The doctor is now following you on Twitter

Scientists say social media can track diseases better than the CDC

By

JenWieczner

Savvy analysts and investors have been using Twitter to predict election results and identify new hot stocks. (See The wishdom of crowds)

Now a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University is using the social media site to track the movement and severity of the flu — and their work may be used to address other public-health issues. (See U.S. researchers tracking flu through Twitter)

Rob Marmion / Shutterstock.com

As people tweet personal details about their health (and illnesses), the scientists screen the social network to gather data on influenza cases in the U.S. While health experts have in the past had trouble monitoring the virus, since people with the flu often stay home in bed, social media sites like Twitter may provide a unique real-time window into national epidemics even as they play out behind closed doors.

“When an influx of mentions of the flu start appearing on Twitter, it can be used to see where the strain started and how quickly it is spreading just by following the conversations about it,” says Sheldon Levine, community manager for Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics company.

Inspired by the power of the tweets to reveal trends faster than traditional surveys and polling, the researchers began monitoring Twitter for health issues about two years ago. They saw potential, for example, in the social media site’s ability to pick up an earthquake in Washington, D.C., moments before people felt it in Manhattan — faster than seismic monitoring equipment could even have detected it, says Michael Paul, a doctoral student in computer science collaborating on the studies. Twitter, the researchers say, might yield flu intel faster than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Because people are sharing so much on Twitter in their everyday lives, we thought we could leverage that to look at people’s health,” Paul says.

He and his colleagues have since been able to map out the danger zones for allergies in real time, with Twitter users inadvertently identifying certain cities and states that are allergen hotbeds. The researchers are also looking at other health issues to pick up on trends, including obesity, hospital errors and self-medication, as well as drug misuse and abuse.

It’s not the first time social media analytics have been harnessed for health purposes or even tracking the flu. In 2008, search-engine giant Google launched a tool called Flu Trends, which used flu-related Web search patterns to follow the virus. (See Google.org/flutrends) Soon, scientists might also harness the power of Facebook’s new “graph search” tool to track the flu and other health issues, says John Bonini, marketing director for Impact Branding & Design.

But Google’s Flu Trends tool has been criticized for failing to pick up on the swine flu (H1N1) epidemic, and this year the service is overestimating the flu, according to Paul. Google declined to comment.

Twitter, which provides more descriptive information than simple search engine trends, as well as location data, might allow a rare detailed look at people’s health habits. “As researchers, we don’t have a clear picture of what people do in their homes,” Paul says. “We can only look at what people publicly share, but you’d be surprised what people are willing to post up there.” For example, the researchers noticed that people with the flu (who tend to tweet often while they’re home sick, Paul says) were tweeting about taking antibiotics — an ineffective flu treatment that doctors recommend against because influenza is a virus.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to develop a sort of early-warning system for a particularly severe flu season or disease — a potentially valuable public-health resource that could help communities, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals prepare for an influx of patients, securing extra beds and medication, Paul says.

So far, say the researchers, the Twitter readings on this year’s flu show it to be more severe than usual. Sadly, the technology isn’t yet up to the task of replacing groundhog Punxsutawney Phil; it can’t predict how much longer this winter will last.

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